Women and peace-building in Northern Ireland’s print news media

Abstract

This research sits at the nexus of women, peace-building and the news media in order to decipher how the representations of women and peace-building in post-conflict Northern Ireland affect women’s social situation in divided societies recovering from violent ethnonational conflict. Women are habitually associated with non-political community-level reconciliation through an assumed innate and feminine propensity to peace. This is amplified through gendered news media portrayals which serve to reinforce patriarchal social knowledge, and in turn, this disenfranchises women by foregrounding their femaleness rather than political expertise; and damages peace by marginalizing a significant demographic of the population and intensifying social inequality, which is the foundation for conflict.